Epic Fury, strategic failure: America’s Iran debacle

America’s assault on Iran has exposed the limits of U.S. military power, drained its defences and strengthened the very forces Washington sought to weaken, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.

ON 10 MAY, Robert Kagan, the high priest of neoconservative thought, the bell-ringer for muscular interventionism and general American meddlesomeness, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran.

The article says much about Kagan’s own identification with the obvious; some feat given the military fancy and fantasy that continues to blot the current Trump Administration.

Be that as it may, he finds the Iran war dishing out a defeat to the United States of unique quality, one that ‘can neither be repaired nor ignored’. No ultimate American triumph could emerge, and nothing would ‘undo or overcome the harm done’ to ‘return to the status quo ante’. The Strait of Hormuz would not be “open” as it was prior to 28 February. Iran’s regional position, far from being blunted, had improved. China and Russia had been strengthened; the U.S. “substantially diminished”.

Kagan argues:

‘Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.’

This prompting was undoubtedly due to the claim made by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 5 May in the White House Press Briefing Room that Operation Epic Fury had concluded, though U.S. President Donald Trump, ever keen to keep an iron in the fire, huffed that Iran had to agree ‘to give what has been agreed to’. (The “what” is always the problem in Trumpland.) Not doing so would result in bombing ‘at a much higher level and intensity than it was before’.

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The President had also “paused” Project Freedom, that massive prop of wishful thinking involving the use of the U.S. military to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The pause – effectively a breezy termination – had been induced, in no small part, by the grumpiness of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, worried that adventurism in the Strait would incite yet another round of Iranian attacks on Gulf states. To show his disapproval, the Crown Prince had refused to permit the use of the Prince Sultan Airbase for U.S. operations.

Iran’s airstrikes had also shown far more bite than was initially reported, at least in the Western media stable. Some of this can be put down to restrictions on the release of satellite imagery supplied by commercial providers Vantor and Planet. Both have been compliant with the Pentagon’s request to either limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of timely imagery covering the region. The Iranians, through state-affiliated news outlets, felt no such restraint.

On 6 May, The Washington Post, after examining Iranian satellite imagery, reported that some 228 structures and pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since 28 February had been damaged and destroyed. Hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, vital radar, communications and air defence equipment had been struck by Iran’s forces. The dangers posed by Iranian strikes had been so formidable as to force some U.S. bases in the region to relocate personnel out of missile range.

In its analysis, the paper claims to have verified some 109 images, aided by a comparison with lower-resolution imagery obtained from the European Union’s Copernicus satellite system, and any high-resolution images at hand from Planet.

The Iranian images also confirmed previously reported damage or destruction inflicted on several U.S. military assets:

the radomes at Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait and at the 5th Fleet Headquarters;
the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence radars and equipment located at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and two sites in the United Arab Emirates;
a second satellite communications site located at al-Udeid Air Base; and
an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft and a refuelling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The analysts roped in to examine the images were impressed.

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Mark Cancian, a former Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), found the strikes to be “precise”:

“There are no random craters indicating misses.”

William Goodhind of the open-access research project Contested Ground, in addition to noting the destruction of equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure, found damage to “soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation”.

To add stinging insult to burgeoning injury, the defences used to cope with Iranian strikes proved staggeringly draining and disproportionately costly. The CSIS estimates the use of at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors between 28 February and 8 April, running down inventories of both at 53% and 43% respectively.

And just to improve the mood in Washington, Tehran, according to an analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, retains roughly 75% of its pre-war inventories of mobile launchers and roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile. Vague as they are, that’s another objective of Operation Epic Fury dashed.

While the childish pantomime of non-diplomacy continues (Trump rages that the ceasefire with Tehran, given the latest “piece of garbage” of a counter proposal, is on “life support”), Washington is banking on a strangulation policy through yet another project of dubious merit: Economic Fury.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent tooted on 11 May:

“As Iran’s military desperately tries to regroup, Economic Fury will continue to deprive the regime of funding for its weapons programs, terrorist proxies, and nuclear ambitions. Treasury will continue to cut the Iranian regime off from the financial networks it uses to carry out terrorist acts and to destabilise the global economy.”

Economic Fury, still in its swaddled infancy, also risks early retirement. Iranian stubbornness and stout resilience continue to trouble analysts in the intelligence community. A CIA analysis circulated this month concluded that Tehran could withstand the U.S. naval blockade for between 90 and 120 days before experiencing dramatic economic deterioration.

Iran’s economy may be in a wretched state, but parochial determination has a certain staying power. Bureaucratic bickering, however, often finds its way, and a senior U.S. intelligence official (who could be anyone) has surfaced to counter the claims of the assessment. Genuine, extensive and rapid economic damage is being inflicted. The U.S. remains in the ascendant.

These varied intelligence assessments of decorative astrology cannot escape the dunderheaded reasoning that undergirded the war, along with the failure to appreciate the shocks caused, not merely by Iran’s closure of the Hormuz Strait but its systematic shredding of the U.S. security guarantee for Gulf states.

Unlike the fumbling, inventive antics shown prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the CIA and allied intelligence services were well aware that a campaign against Iran was freighted with terrible risk. Ensnared and trapped, Trump will find it hard to avoid using the good offices of China’s President Xi Jinping to lean on Beijing’s ally. If so, it is bound to come at an exacting price.